It will soon be 3 years since the first LLMs were launched, and we have entered a relatively interesting period. While the first few weeks with AI brought with them a combination of euphoria and fears, we have now reached a strange standstill. On the one hand, the initial exponential development seems to have stalled, but on the other hand, countless AI specialists, trainers and other visionaries have emerged on the market. AI and LLMs have become the new religion, and membership of the ChatGPT is the only prerequisite for the emergence of the sector.
In reality, AI is nothing more than the new Excel. Powerful, useful, sometimes even brilliant, but in the end just a tool. But nobody identifies as an Excel-based marketing strategist. So why is there such a fuss about AI?
In the last three years, digital marketing has been flooded with different AI-based tools, each more revolutionary than the last. However, if you look behind the marketing slogans, the vast majority are simple web applications that send a query to a few LLMs, hide the result behind a beautiful UI and collect a tenfold margin. It’s not a revolution, it’s just a new business model.
But the problem is not so much the tools as how they are used and for what purposes. If a business has unstructured data, non-existent goals and a flawed strategy, AI cannot save its marketing. It won’t make marketing smarter or more creative, it will just produce more garbage faster. If you ask some LLM to create a landing page for a 139-year-old soft drink brand, the result will be the most breathless and unimpressive landing page imaginable. This is precisely because artificial intelligence can create content based on a rough draft, but it cannot harness the creativity that gives successful projects soul. The result is incomparable to, for example, a real Coca-Cola campaign leaflet.
But AI makes marketing more accessible to everyone – it allows anyone to be a field media planner, digital media specialist or analyst. And as a result, the market is flooded with AI trainers and specialists – people who have done a few courses on how to use LLMs and are now selling prompts as if they were quantum physics. All this is reminiscent of fifteen years ago, when SEO specialists were popping up like mushrooms after the rain, each promising to get your website to number one on Google, but whose real expertise was limited to backlink spamming and keyword stuffing. Same circus, new clowns.
The real value of AI is not in writing the perfect prompt. The real perceived value lies in the tedious engineering work – connecting AI to existing data and work processes; ensuring data security; collecting and monitoring output data. It’s low-glamour work that’s difficult to exhibit in a Linkedin post, but it’s work that customers really need.
Everybody wants to be a prophet, but if a pipe bursts in the house, without a plumber you’re soon up to your neck in it. The same analogy can be extended to the AI theme – there are plenty of charismatic speakers on the market talking about new-age marketing, but few who can implement the systems to make it happen. The real value is not created by orators, but by those who create systems capable of leveraging marketing.
AI alone does not make a marketer a genius or a visionary. It speeds up workflows, but without quality input, it simply means getting the same poor results faster. If a marketer’s only skill is to write prompts and share AI-generated content, then no AI should be expected to perform miracles. However, if you can integrate AI into your existing workflows, make it work with your data, and get better results, it makes no difference which AI you use. The results are likely to speak for themselves.
Marketing doesn’t need truth-tellers, inspirational slogans or companies that claim to be “AI driven” in every activity. This leads to an entire focus on creating a false impression rather than value. Marketing needs people who understand how systems work and can leverage them with AI.
AI will not destroy or save marketing. It differentiates the real doers from the air castle builders. And perhaps that’s the best thing that can happen to marketing right now.
Article published as part of Best Marketing’s Smart Marketing competition.